


A Matter of Taste

by Runeless



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Bisexual, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussions of Cannibalism, Discussions of Suicide, F/F, F/M, Fallout 3 - Freeform, Heartwarming, Lesbian, Polyamory, Suicidal Ideation, What do you do if you are a monster, all of them - Freeform, all the companions - Freeform, at least, but it all works out in the end, self-hate, to me, trigger warning: suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 16:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6122494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runeless/pseuds/Runeless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Sole Survivor has a horrifying secret, one that shames and disgusts her.  The others find out, and they deal.  Sometimes it takes a little trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Matter of Taste

**Author's Note:**

> This was born from a playthrough where I realized that my character, so far a great hero, could take Cannibalism as a perk, and then I remembered that Fallout 3 had a group of obligate cannibals, and my mind jumped a couple of weird leaps and now we're here. A story about being a monster, and dealing with it.

**A MATTER OF TASTE**

 

                Piper is the first to find out, as she has been Blue’s first for so many things.  Piper was the first real friend Blue made out in the Wasteland; in her initial desperate rush to find her son, Blue had mostly passed Preston and his ragtag group of survivors by, barring an initial heroic rescue in power armor scarred by monstrous claw.  It had first been Piper, seemingly normal to Blue- a reporter, not a raider or Minuteman or any of the other mad archetypes that had grown in the Wasteland since the bombs fell - to whom Blue had spilled her guts and, more quietly and later, her tears.  And in the time since- past horrifying revelations of Shaun, past Kellogg’s depth-plumbed brain, past war and death and the rebuilding of the Minutemen and the arrival of armored fanatics in a great steel airship- another first happened.  Something so big it has eclipsed everything else in Piper’s life. 

                Love.  The first person Blue has loved since the end of the world.

But these are the Wastes, and for all Piper’s seeming idealism, she has never truly believed that she would ever be happy, not since the day her father was murdered for a traitor’s paltry payment in caps.  She knows this will break.  Two-hundred year old women do not wander out of Vaults, unthawed, and enter the life of one Piper Wright, who is too loud, too brassy, who is one-half self-hate and one-half tin can orchestra.  Ancient people of a country Piper has only barely heard of - the USA, one of the two legendary titans who broke the world- do not walk into Piper’s office with its half-working hot plate and shuddering printer, see Piper as she truly is, and fall in love.  The General of the Minutemen- and God in hell, Piper never expected to see _that_ star rise again- does not pick for her wife some woman who has devoted her life to tearing down others because she cannot figure out how to build herself up.

(She’s good at gnawing on things, Piper is, but she doesn’t seem to take in anything she eats; she has never grown.  She feels like her father’s death locked her in as that angry teenager, knowing the problem but only able to rail about it in hopes someone else can find a solution. She lives her life frozen mid-rant.  Irony of ironies, given who she married.)

Blue, beautiful, perfect Blue, does not kneel before Piper, silly, irritating Piper, who never amounted to much, with the wedding ring of her dead husband in her hand, and with tears in her eyes, ask Piper to marry her.

Piper knows that she is not worthy of this. 

So the entire relationship has been, at least on Piper’s end, fraught with a rising tension, wondering when the news would break.  She can’t see the headline, but she knows it’s coming- an obituary on the front page.  Literal or figurative, it matters not; losing Blue will kill Piper as surely as a bullet.

But she cannot stop the presses, and that headline is coming. 

At first, she had thought it would be Cait, who Blue first observes with something that is half-pity, half-lust, but it turns out that Cait writes her own headlines; fighting back against Blue’s pity, accepting only Blue’s friendship, even when she was so strung out on Psycho that just looking at her made Piper’s hackles rise.  Cait, who flirted with the _both_ of them outrageously, who ended up not in Blue’s bed or Piper’s bed but took the two of them into her _own_ bed.  Cait, who Piper resisted at first because she is already so insecure with Blue that the idea of having _two_ lovers- of being more- privately scared the hell out of her, though she finally caved in and gave herself what she wanted no matter how afraid she was.  Cait, who is wonderful and beautiful and so very strong- who has walked all her own way through hell and into heaven, who got their on her own power and her own desire to be clean.  Cait, who is so very _big_ and Piper is so very _small_ , in the scheme of things. 

(What does the master of the Combat Pit, the greatest warrior the various Raider clans have ever produced, have in common with a no-name reporter?  It is a mystery Piper cannot figure out, even as she lives it.)

Cait, who has raised the pressure on Piper unbearably, because now she has _two_ women she loves, two women she does not deserve, and that means that when this ends- as it must end, Piper is as certain of this as she can be - it will hurt twice as bad. 

( Piper is more defined by her loss than the others realize.  In her own way, she envies Strong the most- he alone of Blue’s misfits has lost nothing, too stupid and too forward-looking to even notice anything he might lose.  Even Preston, who spends every day quietly amazed that this is real, at least remembers the pain it took to get here.)

                So when she turns a corner too soon, after yet another desperate battle where Piper’s heart was in her chest and Blue was calm as her cradling ice, and she catches Blue with a raider’s arm in her hands and in her teeth, she is not truly _surprised_.  She is _confused_ as to the specifics, but she is not _surprised_.  It was always going to be something.

                “ Blue?” Piper says, and her heart is in her throat now, as is her gorge- it reminds her of Super Mutants, of the terrible places they have gone on this long, strange journey, where bags of body parts fulfill the role of larders.  Blue is stunned to see her, eyes wide, tiny crinkles near the corner where her skin is too pale- memories of too long cold, kept on the body, like her pure white hair and naturally blue lips, the color of vaultsuits and innocence.  The dark red of arterial blood across them is poetic blasphemy.

                “ Piper?” Blue says, through a mouthful of human flesh.  She swallows, throat working, and there are tears in her eyes.  Piper does not know what to say; for all that she has been waiting for this moment, she has been unable to prepare.  She had expected Blue in bed with one not agreed upon- a betrayal of trust- or for Blue to reveal an authoritarian nature, a desire to be not a General but a Tyrant.  Or even a smaller betrayal- of Blue simply telling her she no longer loves her. 

But this is so… disgusting, yes, but simply so _insane_.  She cannot form a word, and Piper _always_ forms words.

                Blue sighs, then says, “ Somebody was always going to find out.”  She seems more tired than anything, putting the arm down, wiping her mouth- and Piper suddenly puts pieces together, the investigative reporter composes a case file in seconds as she sees the streak on Blue’s armor.  Blue is very careful with her armor, painting it certain ways- certain _obscuring_ ways, Piper sees now.  The fresh blood is hard to spot, even for someone like Piper who is so used to seeing it.  She wonders if Blue’s taste for heavy perfumes is also simply a mask, and in the same second realizes it is.  Just like her fastidious attention to dental care- brushing her teeth before they kiss, cleansing it with mouthwash (or usually just liquor, if that’s what they have available).  The smell of blood down her gullet, covered by alcohol and mint.  Her armor’s design, red splotches on dark, the same color blood would be.  It all fits. 

                “ You’re a cannibal.”  A stupid statement but it is all the wordsmith can come up with.

                Blue nods.  “ My body’s reacted badly to the radiation,” she says.  “ A doctor told me- I was sick, at first.  Remember?  That week where I thought I was going to die- where I sent you away because I didn’t want you to see it.  Remember?”

The second worst week of Piper’s life.  Yes, she remembered.  “ Yes.”

“ The doctor told me that I have a condition that was prevalent in people first exposed to radiation two hundred years ago- something that’s become memory now.  Or legend.  Stories of humans devouring humans- stories people assumed to be about feral ghouls, but that wasn’t always the case.  Right after the bombs fell- when the people were so fresh, so unexposed to radiation- things happened that have never happened since.  The radiation was too strong, the people too pure.  You were born with two hundred years’ worth of radiation in your bloodline; your body adapts, with useful, tiny little mutations.  I don’t have those.  I’m fresh from the past.  Not many people came down with it even when the bombs fell but lucky me- I did.”

“ You have a disease that makes you _eat people_?!?” Piper says, incredulous.  It sounds like the kind of excuse a politician would come up with- _I have a disease that makes me screw my secretary_.  But Blue looks so miserable- and so drained, as if she is so very tired of hiding this- that Piper goes silent and lets her finish.  If it is a lie, she is putting on an incredible act; and if it is _not_ a lie…

( Piper doesn’t think about that.)

“ Yes,” Blue says, quietly.  She can’t look her in the face.  Somehow that’s the part that convinces Piper of the truth- she’s seen Blue lie to people, to their faces, and she’s seen her convince everyone of everything, but she has never once seen Blue talk to someone while looking away.  Even when she asked her to marry her, Blue had looked her in the face.  “ So rare that the doctor had to look up the notes of his predecessors to find out anything about it.  Not a disease, technically- a DNA mistake, a condition.  The genetic default I have prevents me from gaining nourishment from food the way I’m supposed to- it ruins everything in me.  I can eat food for a while but I have to have human flesh.  I’m consuming some vital protein my body doesn’t make, or a host of nutrients I can’t absorb any other way, or perhaps I am simply bargaining my soul, bite by bite, with the devil for a little bit longer on this earth.  His predecessors had many opinions on the subject, medical and religious both, and many of them were expressed with a bullet between the eyes.”

“ Is that why you’re so… gaunt?” Piper asks.  Blue has steadily lost weight the whole time Piper has known her, starting out rather pudgy and cute for the Wasteland the way a recently-pregnant woman of the past might and now being some… wiry, emaciated skeleton, only barely not a ghoul.  Blue has said it is simply the loss of an easy life, but that is a mask too, Piper realizes.

Yet… for all that, Blue is so _strong_.  She’s beaten Strong in arm-wrestling matches, to Strong’s own stunned consternation.  She seems incapable of being truly wounded- Blue has been hit hard enough to kill several lesser people, yet she is always fine afterwards.  Physically, she is a dynamo.  It makes no sense.

The reporter speaks again.  “ But then, how are you so strong if you’re so sick…”

“ It has its benefits, to the extent something like this has benefits,” Blue says.  “ I heal for each bite, I grow so very strong no matter how tiny I am.  My body- it- I’m sorry, it’s hard to talk about.  Not just because of… this… but this is all… sometimes I think I’m asleep and this is a dream, or the bombs fell and this is some mad hallucination I’m having as the radiation kills me- it’s all so magical, and you’ve been one of the best parts of it, Piper, but then there’s always _this_.  Bringing me back down, whenever I look around and see how far we’ve come, the strange beauty of this place- ruined, but it’s coming back, like an ocean tide.  I always believed in humanity and now here we are, we killed ourselves but we brought ourselves _back_ , Piper.  We are our own Lazarus.  My faith has been rewarded, but now I’m being punished for it.  Every time I think we’ve come so far, there’s this… _monstrosity_ reminding me that no matter how bright the future, there is no place for me there.    I’m the nightmare in my own dream.  If this is real… if this is really happening, then it doesn’t end well for me, Piper.  There is no happy ending for a cannibal.”

She sounds the way Piper feels inside, tired and slow and so… overwhelmed.  Blue, who has killed Behemoths.  Blue, who has not only destroyed but _created_ \- Blue, who has beaten back apathy and evil.  Blue, who has never before seemed so very _fragile_.  The blood on her face and arm are signs of failure.

“ What do you mean?” Piper asks, even though she knows full well what she’s talking about.  There are some sins no one tolerates. 

Blue’s sigh is quiet.  “ Piper, you’re the one holding the gun.  You know how this ends.”

And she’s right, as Blue always is.  Piper hadn’t realized it herself, but her gun- a model Blue made for her, an overcranked piece that still sits nicely in her hands, a pistol Blue lovingly named the Hardball as a joke about newspapers that took two hundred years to tell- is in her hands and the safety is off.  Once noticed, the weight of it hits Piper, heavy like a coffin or a tomb.  Piper knows what she is going to do with this gun, what _must_ be done- and the weight of the future pulls on the trigger.

“ Do it,” Blue says.  “ Please.  I never wanted it to be you or Cait or even Nick- I wanted it to be Preston, he would do his duty and be done with it and it would not haunt him- but I did not choose this disease’s start and I don’t choose its end.  Do it.  I… won’t go where Nat is, I will never see Shaun as he was supposed to be, but I’ll be dead and this will be over… help Preston, will you?  He’s an incredible second, but he’s a poor General.  Keep him on track- tell Cait I’m so sorry, but don’t tell her you did this, she’ll never forgive you- don’t tell _anyone_ , Piper, it will ruin all we’ve done.  I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.  Make this work, Piper.  Make it work.  Fix more than the wall in Diamond City.  You can do it.”

And she finally looks at her, and her face is a mess of emotions- Piper can’t even breathe, the gun is so heavy in her hands, not pointed at Blue yet but it will be, cause and effect in reverse.  She can feel her arm lifting the gun because she _will_ lift the gun, something so certain it reaches backwards in time.  Blue is right.  She is a cannibal.  Settlements only ever do one thing with cannibals.  And it will do so much harm for anyone to know that the savior of the Commonwealth is… this.

...In Blue’s eyes, she sees trust.  She _does_ trust that she can do this, and all she has asked of her besides.  Blue believes in her, the way all her friends do- Blue’s misfits- who think better of Piper than she thinks of herself.  Who she owes to Blue. 

( She owes _everything_ to Blue.)

She holds the gun at Blue, and she thinks of how all the fighting has made her a natural at this, and that Blue’s genius in crafting is present in how the grip fits her hand so snugly you’d swear she’d been born with it.  A little pressure from the trigger finger and this is all over- and the headline is in.  **SHOT DOWN A HERO** , and a picture of Blue’s corpse draped in the Minutemen flag. Only Piper will ever know the headline should read **SHOT DEAD FOR CANNIBALISM**.  Blue will die a mourned savior and the Commonwealth she has given so much to build will come into being over her grave.

She can see it, that future that is so very close… but it is not a future Piper wants.

Piper holsters her gun.  It is the hardest thing she has ever done.  The headline in her mind dissipates.  Some events are certain, yes, but just because _they_ are certain doesn’t mean _Piper_ is. 

(And Piper just wants to be happy, and to be looked at by a woman who believes in her.  Finally, finally, Piper thaws- just a little- and for the woman of the ice, no less.  But she wants to be happy.  She wants to stop expecting disaster.  She wants to live again, and move on past murdered fathers and betrayed innocence.  And it starts with Blue.  It starts with dealing with this.)

“ Piper?” Blue, face stained with dead man’s blood, says in confusion.  Piper is shaking and wants to throw up, but her mind is her own again; fate averted, destiny sets her loose.  She has her own choices again.

“ Eat up,” Piper says, and forces a grin.  It is queasy and weak and it is the best grin she has ever made, because no other grin has cost her so much.  “ If you’re so gaunt- you’re not eating right.”

Blue just stares at her, and Piper thinks of something that is _hilarious_.

“ Well, I mean, technically you _never_ eat _right_ but you can at least eat _well_!”

And she laughs, big deep belly laughs, and mid-laugh she vomits _everywhere_.

Later, when she is done, and Blue has finished patting her on the back and giving her water (and she’s moving so much slower than normal; her poor Blue, who is alive when she expected to be dead, who has twice been before the reaper and had her time postponed), Piper says,  “ Look, we’ve got to deal with this.  It gets worse the longer it’s hidden.”

“ How in the world are we going to broach this?” Blue says.  “ Piper, I’ve already thought about this a hundred ways-“

“ Hush,” Piper says, and puts a finger to Blue’s lips.  She half-expects her to bite down, and then is ashamed of herself for it; Blue has had a million opportunities to hurt her, and she has not taken not a one.  More for herself than for Blue, Piper pushes her finger all the way against those lips, trusting the hunger behind them not to hurt her.  “ And go eat!  God!  Don’t let me watch, but like, go eat.  Seriously, you’re terrible looking.  Starved.  _Go eat._ ”

Blue is stunned and lost, face and eyes open, and it reminds Piper of when she walked in her office, frightened and new and innocent, like a stumbling newborn.  Piper kisses her on the cheek, lightly, above one of her scars.  To her own surprise, she is not repelled.  Oh the act itself grosses her out to think about; but _Blue_ does not gross her out.  It is something they will deal with, nothing more.

“ _Go_ ,” she repeats, firmly, softly.  “ It’ll be ok.  Just eat your fill- much as you can.  We’ll get you looking healthy yet.  Though, err, shouldn’t you cook it first?”

“ It doesn’t matter,” Blue says.  “ Actually tastes better raw, the doctor said my condition prevented most diseases you can catch that way from sticking, and I haven’t… it’s too risky to try to hide what it is and bring it to a campfire.  Only did that a few times, while I was traveling alone with Dogmeat after the first diagnosis.”

“ Then go,” Piper says.  “ And we’ll talk when you’re done.”

Blue hugs her, and Piper hugs her back fiercely.

They’ll figure it out.

(The future is now uncertain.  Piper blesses the chaos.)

                -

Cait has a right to know, because she is their lover too; some things are owed, in a relationship.  Piper is the one who broaches it, and Cait is at first concerned that someone’s dying; she’s not precisely wrong, Blue notes sardonically, as the three talk in a private room at Sanctuary Hills.  The only thing visible outside the window is Nat’s grave, dug by Blue herself after she had already hauled his dead body out of its tomb all alone, an act of love and loss that is so big Piper does not think of it.  The flowers over it wave gently in the wind, blue as the last thing Nat wore before he died.

(Codsworth’s flowers, taken care of for two hundred years past radiation showers and raiders, come all this long distance from flowers Nat had once planted himself to find their final resting place over his grave.  There is a poetry and a pain in Blue’s life that makes Piper wonder if she was somehow predestined for all this; or if, perhaps, only someone with such poetry and pain could become what Blue has turned herself into, not fate but requirements.)

“ So what’s up?” Cait asks.  “ Come on, speak up, you’re worrying me sick over here.”

“ I have a condition,” Blue says.  “ It’s not fatal, but it is… grotesque.  I don’t absorb food like I should…”

The explanation’s pretty simple, and at the end of it Cait is scratching her head.  “ So… when you headed off alone in the Vault, afore I got fixed-“

“ Hungry,” Blue confirms.  “ Starving, rather.  Had to eat.”

“ The blood on your face wasn’t from a fight, then,” Cait says.  Cait’s smarter than she acts, partly because she’d have to be to still be alive, and partly because where intelligence fails sheer hard-won experience compensates.  “ You… huh.  Fuck.”

She waits a moment, then shrugs.  “ You gave a shite when I was on Psycho and as ready to kill ya as look at ya, guess I’m stuck with ya.  It’s… well, it’s _almost_ not the worst thing I’ve ever seen.  Jesus.”

Blue smiles and says, “ Cait, comforting as always.”  Cait laughs, big bawdy laughs, then runs and jumps Blue, straight into her arms, barreling her out of her chair.

“ Now come on then,” Cait says.  “ Yer looking a skinny bitch.  Preston’s going on about raiders near Jamaica Plain.  Let’s go get you a feast.”

“ Holy shit,” Piper says, staring at Cait, who winks back at her.

“ What?  It’s like picking up groceries at market!  And you don’t even gotta pay for them.”

“ I’m gonna be sick,” Piper mutters, as Blue laughs again, Cait tickling her viciously.

“ Eh, Wasteland life was always gonna have some weird fuck up innit,” Cait offers, which is damn near profound.

-

Curie approaches it as a doctor, of course.  It is Cait who tells her, because Cait wants this cured; she was saved from her own illness, and Cait believes in cures now, in panaceas for every ill. 

(She helps Blue feed, but she sees how much it sickens Blue herself, to do what she does, and so she will fix it.  It is the least she can do.)

Curie, under every secrecy known (and the one that will stop her, doctor/patient), approaches Blue while she is alone and bombards her with questions.

“ How many people have this disease?” Curie asks, excited and with a pencil and a checksheet and everything.  Almost adorable, in her innocence, and Blue decides to play along.  Talking about it with Piper and Cait was terrifying and horrifying in the gut-deep kind of way, even in guts as odd as a cannibal’s; but Curie is something ridiculous, a French robot become a Synth become a Minuteman.  She runs the clinic at the Castle now, in-between shooting things alongside Blue and the others, and sometimes it’s hard to believe Curie exists.  She seems so improbable that every now and then Blue just laughs to herself thinking about it.

“ Not many.  Very few people are born with it and those people who had it at the start are all dead- or at least, should be.  There’s scattered reports of cannibals living longer than they should, up to centuries, but it’s hard to differentiate them from stories about feral ghouls.”

“ Not many are born with it?”

“ No.  It’s almost always fatal for fetuses.  Sometimes you get throwbacks- people whose family have been living so cleanly that they react to the radiation like people from my time did- well, do in my case- but usually that’s all you get.  And even amongst the people first exposed, this condition was incredibly rare.  Few babies are born with this… thing.  Those that are tend to die after being weaned, because the parents don’t know what to feed it- or they die when their parent’s home is attacked, because the parents _do_ know what to feed it, because they eat it too.  Stories of cannibals can turn the guts even of Raiders, and they do not care for reasons why.  Not that they should- most people with this disease, once they figure it out, end up serial killers and monsters.  Deserving of death.”

Curie is weirded out by that, and the vindictiveness with which it is said, but soldiers on through.  (She privately thinks Blue could use a psychologist.  Curie IS silly and ridiculous, but she is also far smarter than anyone, even Blue, usually a fair judge of people, knows.)  “ Well, be that as it may, it’s neither here nor there!  Now, I’ve got some medical equipment here in the Castle, so let’s get you started!”

The tests confirm only what Doctor Sun had once said; and Curie promises to fix it.  Blue lets her try.  It does no harm.

(And maybe she will, though Blue doubts it.)

-

With Curie already in the loop, Blue decides it’s time to tell everyone, if for no other reason than that the secret was bound to get out eventually, and it is easier to remain rational about this when Blue is not picking people out of her teeth.  Three know already; now there is simply… everyone else.

Nick they tell first, because Nick has the strongest moral code, and his reaction will be one of the most extreme.  At least, that is what Blue tells them.

(The truth is, she feels as if her execution keeps getting stayed, and she is so tired of it.  Let it end.  Nick will kill her.  His judgment is _always_ correct.  And if he decides she is to die, she will be glad to go.  The guilt eats her alive with every bite of human flesh, irony at its finest and most grotesque.)

So they approach him at his work, and alone in his office, the three tell him the truth.  He is initially stunned beyond belief, but his mechanical mind clicked fast; he rendered judgment on Blue before he spoke.

                (He calls her Blue in his own head because Piper- heroic, loud, trumpeting Piper, who if turned into a synth would have a megaphone for a mouth- got him doing it too.)

                “ This true?” he asks, and she nods.  He thinks with a mind that is one-half ancient dead policeman and one-half wasteland synth, pulling apart the facts like any good case file, constructing a profile of the woman who sits before him, face a haunted graveyard of hungers, beside a former Raider and current teetotaler and the only investigative reporter in the entire world.  The gathering is odd, all these three meeting in a robot’s house, but everything in all of their lives is odd, so in its own way, it’s almost… normal.

                (Nick puts it together, starting from the beginning.  Blue, who entered the ice a lawyer, a wife, and a woman only barely trained in battle and engineering by a husband who worked through his PTSD by making sure his wife could fight off any communist invaders.  Blue, who left the ice jobless, a widow, and a sole survivor.  Blue, who is now the General of the Minutemen, the greatest force for good in the Commonwealth.  Blue, who is now one of Nick’s best friends- perhaps his _best_ friend- and technically a partner at this very agency, a deal made back when she’d assisted him for his help, before Minutemen and artillery strikes and flying warships piloted by monsters in human skin and powered armor.  Smaller days, less fraught with high stakes.  Blue, who is… Blue.  Who, if anybody ever did… has earned her right to a second chance, to… trust.)

“ And you’ve spoken with doctors about it?” he asks.  That’s the hinge, in its own way.  Grotesque as it is, medical necessity forgives a monumental amount of sins.  She nods.

“ Doctor Sun and Curie both know,” she tells him.  “ Sun gave me my initial diagnosis, Curie is currently working on finding a cure, or at least, a treatment.”

He nods, resolving to speak with those two, but not doubting her.  It’s a lie too easily found out to _be_ a lie.  So it’s true then.  Blue is a cannibal not by choice but by horrible requirement, for the world never did care for human propriety… and she deserves forgiveness and help, even for sins as grievous as foul hungers. 

(He forgives her before he speaks.  If she can accept a synth as a man, he can accept a cannibal as a hero.)

“ Is that why you let Pickman go?” Nick asks, surprising all three of them.  But the detective has made the connection- a woman forced into cannibalism and a man forced into murder, both making the best of what they were.  Perhaps Blue’s judgment in the Pickman case was not quite impartial.

“ Yes,” Blue says, nodding.  She’d told the others not to react if Nick shot her, and has been patiently waiting his judgment; Nick’s the best man she knows, and love does not blind him.  His judgment she trusts.  “ How could I do anything else?  I’d be a hypocrite.”

“ He knew,” Nick says, eyes narrowing as his memory banks puked up a picture- the image of Pickman, who looked in Blue’s eyes and saw something he… recognized.  From one soft-spoken sadist to the General of the Minutemen, a moment of shared understanding.  “ There at the end, as you let him go… he knew.”

“ It’s close enough,” Blue says, quiet.  “ I… he fed me, once.  When this first happened, as I staggered out of Diamond City half out of my mind with hunger and horror- I found a house he’d been to.  Near some railroad tracks.  The scattered dead, freshly killed- I fell on the corpses and ate there, and found his calling card later, when I awoke from the feast.  It was like having manna fall out of heaven.  Good thing, too- in my state, any raider would have killed me easily.  Once we started investigating and I saw the pattern- what was I supposed to do?  He’s tied in to this life, Nick, the same in the ways that matter.  Neither of us chose this.”

Nick nods, and the silence stretches out towards eternity.

“ So what will you do?” Blue asks.  He sighs.

“ Tell the others,” he says.  He has forgiven her; but now she must seek the forgiveness and understanding of others.  “ This must be out.  It is not right to keep a secret this big- we’ve all told you our own.  Now it’s your turn.  Trust us.  This… really isn’t your fault, and a lot of what we feel about it is frankly simply how gross we find it.  You’re a good woman with a horrible condition.  That’s about it.”

She nods, but does not quite believe he did not shoot her until she is outside, under the stars, with Cait and Piper’s hands on her, moving her towards home and nightmare-haunted sleep.

-

It is Hancock she sees next, because he is the next most likely to kill her for it.  Hancock is laid back, but he’s the kind of man who believes in justice-despite the fact neither sees it, Blue has always regarded his closest equivalent amongst all her friends as _Nick._ For all that Hancock’s more obvious vices obscure it, Hancock is a just man- to the innocent and merciful, innocence and mercy; to the cruel and murderous, cruelty and murder.  His justice is of a kin with Nick’s, one from law books, the other from first principles- but both are men who will kill a cannibal, and they are the twin gauntlet Blue must pass before coming out into light.  With one down, she must see the second before she will let herself believe this is all real.

She goes to him alone and at night, because, though Nick has forgiven her, she has not quite forgiven herself; and if Hancock should kill her, she wants it to be done in such a way that he will escape blame.  Let it be done.

(She wonders if Nick only let her go because her wives were there.  She will not make that mistake this time.  She must be judged.  There are guilts that can never go away.)

He meets her, and jokes about cloak and dagger- a joke that falls away as she speaks, and is harsher on herself than she should be, pins too much blame on herself.  In her own way, she is seeking suicide, and by Hancock’s hand.

( It is cruel to ask a friend to kill her, even in this sideways askance form, but she is so very tired.  And her self-hate clouds her judgement.)

He watches her with those quiet black eyes, calculating the same way Nick did.  Hancock, for all of his humor and strangeness, is the most deadly serious person Blue knows- a man who believed he had done wrong so much he willingly inflicted Ghouldom on himself, just to be punished for his sins.  There is a steel core in Hancock, and it is why no drug ever truly touches him on the inside- there is no force strong enough to break the moral center of the mayor of Goodneighbor.  Not even death can tarnish a perfectly just heart.

“ And that’s the size of it,” she says, though it is not.  She left out how _overwhelmed_ by it she is, by the sheer scope of the horror of her existence, and how much she hates herself for it- but Hancock hears it anyway, in her tired words.  She is not the first person come to him seeking a peaceful death by other hands.

( Some of Goodneighbor’s people are not evil, just broken, and it is a mayor’s duty to provide what his people need.)

So saying, she waits, wondering if the knife he killed with when she first met him will be how she meets her end… and he just sighs.

“ I think,” he says,” that you’re more hung up on it than you should be.”

She snaps awake from her guilt-induced trance and glares at him, and he holds up a hand.

“ Look, you didn’t come out here to see my reaction, you came out here to get killed, and I ain’t making it that easy for you.  You want to die, you either stand up and do it yourself or go get some Raiders to do it.  I ain’t killing ya.”

She looks in his eyes, hunting pupils that aren’t really there, and sighs as tears form in her eyes.  “ You’re right.”

Hancock nods.  It’s to Blue’s credit that she’s never really been able to lie to herself.  She’s crying, now, salt tracing her scars, and Hancock moves and gives her a hug.  She don’t resist, though he’s seen her grab super mutants by the arm and break their bones- it wouldn’t be too hard to get out of his grip, if she wanted. 

“ Hey, hey, hush,” he says.  “ We trust ya, alright?  Let me guess, you’ve told… hmm.  Piper, Cait, and probably Nick.  Right?”

She hiccups, laughs, and says, “ Yes, and Cait told Curie.  How’d you…?”

“ You’d have told your wives first,” he says, “ ‘cause that’s the way you are, then you’d have asked Nick hoping he’d shoot you, and when that failed you came to me hoping I’d stab you.  And now you’ll probably go talk to Preston, hoping he’ll do his duty to the Minutema

n and shoot you in the head before anyone _else_ finds out.  You ain’t got no give in you, Blue, which is good!  I mean, you built the Minutemen back from the ground up because there is nothing in you that can bend.  But… you know why you like traveling with me, kid?  Because with me you can relax that tiny amount you allow yourself too- you know I’m a good guy, just looser than Preston, and so when we’re hanging out you’re just a tiny bit less tightly wound.  Blue… you gotta learn to calm down.  Jesus, the whole world doesn’t depend on you being a _paragon_.”

“ But… what I do…”

He sighs, rolls his eyes.  “ Look, is it killing any Minutemen?”

“ What- no!”

“ Any innocents?  Settlers just trying to grow fucking tatos, or merchants just wanting to sell shitty jackets?”

“ No,” she says, screwing up her face into resistance, seeing where he’s going with this and fighting it all the way like a stubborn mule.  Blue does not have a stick up her ass- that indicates a person more of prudishness than morality- but Hancock’s assessment is right; she is like an oak, she cannot bend for fear she will break, her morals too carefully constructed to allow for change.  Like a legal argument of old, built on precedent and principle. 

Hancock cannot possibly change that about her- and he doesn’t want to, Blue’s ferocious heroism is saving the world and frankly the wasteland could do with more people like her- so he has to work around it, try to convince her it doesn’t go so directly against principle.  Probably a fool’s errand but Blue can’t get herself killed yet, there’s more work needs doing.

“ So who has it hurt?” he asks.  She sighs, sways.

“ And if it gets out of control?” she asks, changing the subject so she doesn’t have to admit that it hasn’t hurt anybody- even the people she’s eaten she was going to kill anyway, for being Raiders and Gunners.  “ If the hunger dominates me-“

Hancock can’t help it.  He laughs.  Big, open, belly laughs, the kind he has not had in far too long, not since before seeing the ghouls die under his brother’s orders while he did nothing.

(Hancock, like Preston, has moved on from his past mistakes, but he does not forget.)

She is offended again, and he laughs as he wipes a dry tear from wrinkled cheek.  “ What, like something out of a comic book?  Blue, it’s _you_.  Ain’t nothing drives you in your own head but you.  Go home, fuck your wives, and come morning forgive yourself, alright?  I swear, you are the most tense sentient being of any kind in the Commonwealth, you’re the only person I know more tightly wound off Psycho than on.  Hell, take some Psycho for that matter, calm down a little.”

And that _is_ pretty funny, so even as angry as she is, Blue is a little amused, and- to her own surprise- takes Hancock’s advice.

(Come morning, in their arms, she cannot quite forgive herself- not yet- but she is beginning to believe there is a future for her, and she decides that when she goes to see Preston, she will defend herself if he tries to kill her.  There may be a tomorrow for her after all.)

-

She goes to Codsworth next, because she has decided not to commit suicide by friend, and Codsworth is the last family she has; really, he should have been told before Hancock or Nick, and so she rectifies that mistake now. 

Codsworth is told, shrugs his little robot arms, and laughs.  “ Commonwealth steak tartare, then?” he says, which is so horrid that only Cait laughs, and that more out of surprise than anything.  Piper goes off to be queasy in convenient nearby bushes, and Blue- hearing a joke about the most shameful, horrible thing she does, something she herself hates so much she nearly starves herself just to get away from it- simply gets angry.

“ Why are you taking this so well?” she fumes at the robot, and he laughs again.

“ Ma’am, I crossed two hundred years to see you again- living through this,” he says, waving an actuator over the Commonwealth’s ruined beauty.  “ Since your return I’ve been happier than I’ve been in so very long that, frankly, so long as you aren’t trying to eat _me_ , I don’t particularly care what you do.”

And that is that, at least as far as Codsworth is concerned.

(Well, not _quite_ all.  He has crossed centuries only to reunite with his family, and to find the woman he once knew changed- not just into a cannibal, but into a legend.  The Sole Survivor.  Last of Vault 111.  General of the Reborn Minutemen- enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel, who come from the south with their metal warship and dream of conquest.  Who helps the little, and defeats the mighty.  Codsworth would forgive her much more than odd dietary requirements, to see the last of his little family become so much.)

-

Preston Garvey is the smartest man in the world, which is easy to forget; he’s so bland, really, so empty of quirks or personality deviations that it’s hard to pay attention to what he _does_ when who he _is_ happens to be so… plain.  Blue gets a rude awakening when she broaches the subject with him, because she _has_ to; he is her second, her adjutant, and of everyone in her life but Piper and Cait, he has a right to know.  Now that she has decided not to die, this meeting must take place for the right reasons- though she is a little afraid of his response.

Still, as stated, Preston Garvey is the smartest man in the world.  So when the conversation starts, there in his office in the Castle, as she begins to explain her medical condition, he stops her.

“ Hold it right there,” he says, a hand up.  Blue waits.  He seems at home behind the desk, a man more comfortable with paperwork than with people; for all his quiet faith in the ideals of the Minutemen, Preston is not much of a people person.

“ I know, General,” he says, because he is the only person she knows that Piper has yet to infect with “Blue.”  “ I know all about it.  Say no more; the walls have ears, or at least, that’s what people say.”

She pauses, almost as confused as she was when Piper forgave her all these sins and took her back in her arms. 

(She will never tell Piper, but she knows _why_ Piper pressed her finger so tight to her lips, in the immediate aftermath.  She loves her for it, for that brave wild courage that Piper, impossibly, does not know she possesses.)

“ What?” she croaks out.  Preston nods, as formal as if she’d given a speech.

“ Not at first, of course,” he says.  “ But later, when I put the facts together… simple enough.  I put out feelers, questions.  Even managed to get word from down south from a former Minuteman who’d fled Quincy as the Gunners attacked; she sent word from the Capitol Wasteland when she heard we were rebuilding.  There used to be a settlement in the Capitol Wasteland guarded by people like you.  Gunmen who only came out at night, who called themselves the Family.  They took their payment in blood packs, old from hospitals or new from Rivet City, in lieu of meat.  The Brotherhood wiped them out as mutants, of course, but it is proof enough, isn’t it?  Now, of course, this is second-hand information from a former Minuteman who had abandoned us, but she said there were no stories of them doing anything wrong… I’ve known for a long time, Blue.  I’ve helped clean up, afterwards- you’re not as careful as you think you are.  Half the reason it’s been hidden this long is because the Commonwealth is so decentralized, but you are uniting it behind you- it’ll get harder.  So I’m glad you’re out in the open about this, so we can help you.  They must never know, not, at least, until the proper groundwork has been laid.  They’ll figure it out eventually, but… well, we’ll discuss that later, in private.  We’ll treat it as something new that you acquired, perhaps an Institute plot, and eventually it’ll get accepted as just an unfortunate side-effect of an attack on your person.  Do you hear me?”

Blue, stunned, simply nods.  Preston half-smiles at her, the way he does- he never quite smiles, not since Quincy, but his face does sometimes lighten into a grin and sometimes it almost touches his eyes.

“ And… it doesn’t make me think less of you.  You’ve done too much for something like this to be held against you.  In the end, this isn’t your fault.  Though Doctor Sun isn’t as careful with his files as he should be.”

So without Blue saying more than a word, Preston is informed.

-

Blue saved MacCready’s son, and he actually knows about the Family, tells her stories of blood-drinking, dark-clothed folk who medicated their madness with medicinal packs.  Blue can’t quite do it, though the attempt heartens her- apparently her condition is worse than the Family’s was- but it eases some of her guilty heart. 

As for MacCready, he finds it gross, and it reminds him too much of how Lucy died, so he never watches- but Blue saved his son, and there are some acts that forgive a multitude of sins.

Though he doesn’t think he’ll tell his son about this, when he heads home.

( He does end up sharing it, because when MacCready returns, something of the old mayor in him sparks, that fierce and angry protective part that died when Lucy did, re-awakened by seeing what Blue was capable of.  He will go on to fight the Brotherhood in its own home, using Blue’s methods, and he will become something of a legend himself, in time- the man come home from the north, the prodigal son, who will one day beat the Brotherhood back into the Pentagon and break the chains they imposed, freeing the people and becoming part of the great tapestry of human liberation.  Someday- not today- but someday, there will be a memorial for the man, and it will not call him mayor or mercenary but messiah.)

-

Deacon knew already, which isn’t surprising, because he’s Deacon.  Deacon probably knows things about Blue she doesn’t know herself (and he does).  He’s the Railroad’s representative, so Blue does not tell him, but rather, gives a different message.

“ Deacon,” she says in private, “ I like you, alright?  But you can’t tell the Railroad.”

“ I work for them,” he points out.  Blue nods.  Neither point out that Blue didn’t have to explain to him what he can’t tell them about.

“ That doesn’t matter, Deacon,” she says.  “ The Railroad, at its _best_ , is a cynical, self-interested organization with an incestuous high command and a personality like a bag of snakes.  I want to like you people, I really do, but Desdemona spends a lot of time with her head up her ass and the rest of the organization has PTSD.  The most likely result of them having this information is that Desdemona will use it to try to bully me into doing her dirty work, and if it comes to that, Deacon… Deacon, I will kill them all.  I’m not the Institute.  My people _live_ here.  I’ve got public support undreamed of.  I know half her agents.  I _will_ hunt them down.  So if you care for the Railroad, then understand its true nature.  It did and does help synths, but it has never once cared for anything past that- and it has never had sense enough to see how doing even a little good for other people could help it.  It will try to use it, Deacon, and it will backfire, and the Minutemen will make sure there is no more Railroad.  Do you think I _can’t_ do it, Deacon?”

He pauses, then nods his head.  “ No,” he says, “ I’m pretty sure you can.  That’s why I haven’t told anyone yet, and why I won’t.  Just be careful, Whisper.”

She nods, and that is that.

(Deacon has always been the lone sane voice in the Railroad, the one pointing out that all the code phrases and dead drops in the universe would not change the fact that the average Commonwealth person despised them for doing nothing for them.  The Railroad eventually sinks into oblivion, ruined by its own irrelevancy in a world with a dead Institute and the Minutemen wildly victorious over their foes both scientific and Brotherhood, and the last thing Deacon will ever say to Desdemona before leaving to try his skills elsewhere is ‘I told you so’ that leaves her furious and fuming in the last safehouse, with no one but her own ghosts to blame.)

-

Strong doesn’t understand why Blue hides it, and for that reason alone, Blue kind of likes him the best.  At least the discussion with him isn’t as fraught as the others have been.  He even shares tips on hunger that Blue, to her own surprise, finds herself listening to.  If she is trapped in this life, then she might as well do it right.

Strong approves, and for the first time, Blue finds herself truly appreciating the vast brute.

(Strong, who will surprise everyone, even- perhaps especially- himself.  Strong, who will sacrifice himself to destroy the Institute, when things begin to end.  Who will go down into the reactor alone and destroy it as a gift to his friends, to the Minutemen, whom he joins at last and at the last.  Who will take Preston’s hat with great solemnity and place it atop his own head, mismatched but determined.  Strong, who lives up to his own name and then some, fighting past hordes of synths all alone, thinking to himself all the while how much the little bomb in his hands looks like a bottle, perhaps one for milk.)

But Blue does not yet know what Strong will be, sees only what he is, and so he goes hunting raiders with her, and the two share meals of human flesh, and it is the closest thing to self-acceptance Blue can ever come to her own horrid condition.

(Strong, who will finally realize _what_ the milk of human kindness is, who will realize that it is not drunk but given, that it _does_ make humanity strong- and that, someday, it will let them rise above the super mutants.  He joins that great trend now, honors the race of his birth by sacrificing himself for them, and thinks that the human he once was would be proud of him for it.  It is humans, after all, and not the greenskins, who accepted him, who first gave him the milk of human kindness - Blue first, who pitied the strange super mutant, but soon the others as they came, finally, to respect him, if never to like him.  They have given and made him Strong- and so he gives, to make them Strong.)

Later, when the Brotherhood is beaten back and new fascism lays dead under the ancient guns of freedom, when there is finally time and resources enough, Blue has a statue of him built.  It sits, hat atop head, bomb in hand, standing tall in the middle of the Castle, and a tradition is erected that carries on for years, that new recruits salute him.  Strong, who never lived up to the Minutemen’s ideals but once, but made it count.

(Strong, who will never feel more like he lives up to his name than he does in his last few moments, broken and bleeding and dying even as he reaches the reactor.  Strong, who dies with a brave and brilliant heart, who at last for the _right_ reasons goes forth.  His last thought as he puts the bomb in the reactor with one Strong hand, before there is no more thought, is _Of the milk of human kindness, I have drunk deep… and I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks._   He finally understands the Bard’s words in his last moment.)

Someday, he will die a Minuteman.

-

“ So I’m a cannibal,” Blue finishes, “ and now everybody knows… and no one cares.”

She turns to look at her conversational companion.  Dogmeat looks back at her.

“ Is this what it was like,” she wonders aloud as she looks at him, “ for them to tell me their secrets?”

It feels incredible, these days.  Like a hundred weights lifted off of her- or maybe just lifted up by other hands.  A burden shared and eased.

Dogmeat nuzzles her hand, unconcerned.  She is his mistress and mistress is good.  She pets him and loves him and gives him the canned dog food he loves.  He is unconcerned with revelation.

Blue hugs the dog before she goes back to the Castle, to home, where they know her and she knows them, and all are at peace.


End file.
